Might not be competitive but it’s totally voluntary. No one needs app, it’s not food or shelter, so clearly consumers are willing and able to pay this.
The consumer is willing to pay the price based on the perceived value from the App Store
> The relevant market here is the creators not the consumers. As a creator you have no choice but to accept whatever fees Apple, Google, Steam etc set. Or whatever rates Spotify pays you per stream. The fact you "could" host your own website is irrelevant when the reality is nobody will visit it.
Collective action by the creators would help.
All they have to do is dual-host (a fairly trivial matter, compared to organised collective action). What would make things even better is if they dual host on a competing platform and specify in their content that the competing platform charges lower fees. If even 10% of the creators did this:
1. Many of the consumers would switch. 2. Many of the creators not on the competing platform would also offer dual-hosting.
The problem is not "As a creator you have no choice but to accept whatever fees Apple, Google, Steam etc set". The problem is the mindset that their content is not their own.
I say it's their mindset, because they certainly don't act as if they own the content - when your content is available only via a single channel, you don't own your content, you are simply a supplier for that channel.
> specify in their content that the competing platform charges lower fees.
Apple will ban you for this.
> Apple will ban you for this.
How? I thought it was a Patreon thing - the "competing platform" would be competing with the Patreon app.
I'm not familiar with Patreon, but I thought the way it worked was that you could tip content creators via the Patreon app. I'm pretty certain that Apple cannot tell Patreon (a third party) that they are only allowed to offer exclusive content.
Apple doesn’t allow you to mention that you have alternate payment channels on other platforms. Can’t even allude to it.
To me this is the thing that should be outlawed. Let people pay the Apple tax if they want, but don’t prevent people from making other arrangements. Most people are lazy and will pay the tax, if it isn’t excessive.
> No one needs app, it’s not food or shelter
"No one needs app" is not the same as "No one has biological mandatory need to have an app"
The relevant market here is the creators not the consumers. As a creator you have no choice but to accept whatever fees Apple, Google, Steam etc set. Or whatever rates Spotify pays you per stream. The fact you "could" host your own website is irrelevant when the reality is nobody will visit it.